1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for supporting document production and, more specifically, to a method and an apparatus for presenting information related to a document being produced to a user. 2. Description of the Prior Art
Word processors, which enable the easy revising and brushup of sentences, are now widely used as a means for producing a document. Many types of word processors are also commercially available which additionally provide functions for facilitating document production, such as a synonym retrieval function and a document retrieval function. In particular, in the production of a document, such operations as confirming the correctness of information, augmenting the document through the addition of related information, and searching for a word or expression are very frequently performed. To this end, it is frequently required to refer to other documents.
An example of a document production apparatus that is intended to provide a variety of text expressions is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 3-122760. This document production apparatus has an expression dictionary which stores expressions equivalent or similar to a certain expression. By specifying a form or style of a document in advance through the use of a setup menu, when a certain document is input, the expression dictionary is searched for expressions satisfying the specified condition, and expressions found are incorporated into the document being produced.
However, in the above conventional document production apparatus, since the operation of retrieving other documents is independent of the document production operation, the retrieval of documents can only be performed by suspending document production. Further, to specify a form or style of a text, a user must not only explicitly specify the type of expression but must also input an expression satisfying a retrieval condition. Therefore, the procedure of getting the necessary information is complicated and troublesome, and the desired information cannot be obtained unless a retrieval condition is set clearly.